As operators prepare for next-generation service rollouts, it’s comforting to know that a handful of telecom equipment manufactures are doing their jobs behind the scenes.

 

TMCnet recently spoke with Jeff Hudgins, vice president of engineering for Canton, Mass.-based NEI, for a recent Podcast interview, on work being done by his company to deliver on the promise of open-standards, NEBS-certified 10 GB wire-speed ATCA platforms.

 

NEI has been on the forefront of building carrier-grade NEBS servers, ATCA platforms and SAN storage subsystems that are fully integrated and tested to reduce time-to-market and maximize ROI for carriers, service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers. To ensure its products are flexible and support carrier communications, NEI has had to do a lot of rigorous testing.

 

“The initiative that NEI took was really to prove out that you can run a full 10-gig performance ATCA platform and complete all of the rigorous testing and the NEBS Level 3 test criteria,” Hudgins told TMCnet. “In this particular platform, what we’ve done is taken an off-the-shelf chassis with a 10-gig back plane and populated that with five different vendor solutions, from a 10-gig switch to 10-gig network packet processing blades, and then three different single-board computer ten-gig blades. All of that’s running in one machine, and has gone through all of the NEBS Level 3 test criteria.”

 

The result is a “great proof point” for the whole industry, he added.

 

“This is a great thing that OEMs and service providers can put to the test, deploy in their networks,” Hudgins said.